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Working to strengthen women through the media

The international Association of Women in Radio and TV held its bi-annual members’ meeting in Entebbe, Uganda October 2-5, 2018. CMFE board member Birgitte Jallov took part in the meeting. Her reports on different initiatives can be read here in the next days…

The nearly 50 participants from 20 countries from all continents, shared and compared experience, strategies while planning for action.

Among the most important issues debated were: Countering online harassment of women in the media; Safety for women in the media; Rural Women using (community) media to amplify their voices to fight for their rights; launch of a book on disaster response radio: “Amplifying the People’s Voices: The Philippine Community Radio Experience and Challenges”; and a report on the most recent advances in the Gender Monitoring Project were among the issues presented and debated in the intense 4-day meeting. Read much more here: www.iawrt.org

“We have to begin to consider online harassment a press freedom issue” said Grace Natabalo of the African Centre for media Excellence during the IAWRT regional conference in Uganda October 2-5, 2018. Grace is one of Uganda’s ‘Cyber Queens’, a strong advocate for women and governance issues, and much as she gives many other topics the time of day on her social media, these are the issues she has often chosen to be most vocal about.

Najiba Ayubi from Afghanistan shared a powerful experience from her country, where a journalist had received online harassment messages from a politician, meant to silence her. Instead she published his posts – and was not harassed again. Najiba Ayubi is a journalist and activist. She heads Killid Group, a non-profit media network which publishes two of the most popular magazines in Afghanistan (Killid Weekly and Mursal Weekly), a quarterly cultural Magazine (Sapida) and 11 local radios with an audience of 15 million Afghan people.

The session furthermore shared a video filmed during a recent conference, with ‘Recommendations for countering gender-based online harassment’. The interviews where filmed by the IAWRT Vice President Abeer Saady in an international conference with senior journalists, editors and academics. https://www.facebook.com/birgitte.jallov/videos/10217660596166764/